Last week, we talked about the latest JD Power tablet satisfaction survey, in which Apple lost its usual leadership to Microsoft. In that list, however, Apple still won an honorable second place, with a relatively small difference in points. After all, we were talking about a segment in which Tim Cook and his gang have already lost first place, so no big shock there.
But what if I tell you that, in a segment where Apple has always used to lead the expert press reviews handily, Apple has seen its perennial first place in a renowned survey being replaced not by a second or a third, but by a scary fifth position? Because that is exactly what happened.
THE Laptop Mag, online publication owned by Tom’s Guide, published its annual ranking of best notebook manufacturers. It is the website editors themselves who give points in a series of questions to the main competitors in the segment and determine the big winner of the year.
Here are the fresh 2017 results:
Does it look bad? Then take a look at this other view of the list, with the historical results of the brands:
Well, since the genesis of the research, in 2010, the Apple always topped the ranking of the best laptop manufacturers – the graph above shows only the results from 2013 onwards, but it was exactly the same in previous years. In 2017, however, the Cupertino giant fell to fifth place, losing to Lenovo, ASUS, Dell and HP – from first to fourth place, respectively. Apple also shared fifth place with Acer. Completing the list, we still have, respectively, MSI, Razer, Samsung and Microsoft.
The question is: what are the reasons for such a brutal fall? Certainly you already have a hunch, but in order to be based on cold and realistic numbers instead of words in the wind, let’s take a look at this other list, below, in which the score of each brand in each of the items is highlighted:
As we can see, Apple managed to stand out in some aspects. She led the issue Support, was one of the best (with Dell) in Warranty and also got a good rating in design; the score for the press criticism specialized to the company’s notebooks was halfway. The thing went to Cook’s side, however, in terms of innovation and mainly, value and selection (which assesses the cost / benefit and variety in the range of models offered by the company) – in this, Apple surpassed only Microsoft.
In the text dedicated to Apple on the ranking page, Laptop Mag points out that the newest MacBooks (which includes, I assume, MacBooks Pro with Touch Bar) are slim, powerful and well built, but very expensive, and extremely dependent on adapters and additional ones.
Their evaluation, we have to agree, is nothing different from what we have seen out there: Apple bet a lot on a new generation of computers that, according to her, represent the future of personal computing and will dictate the new rules of the notebook market. She is probably right, I might add. But the fact is that, as I have read in several reviews of the most recent MacBooks, the future is beautiful and wonderful in the place where it belongs – just what is to come, not now.
At the moment – at least for the vast majority of us, merely mortal users still living with pendrives, old university projectors, internet networks not as reliable as we would like and more -, the new MacBooks simply preach for a world where we don’t yet live . I would say that this is the main reason for the fall of the Apple, both in the ranking above and in the reputation with its consumers. Now, if the future will come soon exactly as Cupertino’s engineers predicted and Apple will soon take the lead again or if the company will have to settle for admitting a possible mistake (another?), That we will only know … in the future.
[via 9to5Mac]
